Cryptocurrency Security Daily Review: South Korea experiences a series of financial hacking attacks, Bithumb and leading brokerages are affected, prompting high-level police intervention

Police High-Level Intervention: National Investigation Headquarters Takes Over Serial Hacking Case

As the attack surface expanded from a single cryptocurrency platform to the core national financial brokerage, South Korean law enforcement adopted the highest level of response mechanism. According to Yonhap News Agency, the National Police Agency has officially launched a preliminary investigation into this wave of attacks targeting large financial institutions. Notably, this investigation is not handled by the ordinary cybercrime department but is directly taken over by a special task force under the National Investigation Headquarters, which is responsible for previous serial hacking cases in the financial sector. This elevation in law enforcement standards indicates that authorities believe this is not an isolated random ransomware attack, but rather an organized and premeditated systematic cyber assault on South Korea's financial infrastructure.

Institutions Succumb One After Another: Traditional Brokerages and Cryptocurrency Giants Not Immune

Currently, the list of victims of the attacks has been confirmed to span both traditional capital markets and digital asset trading sectors. Leading cryptocurrency exchange Bithumb, as well as traditional financial giants Mirae Asset Management and Daishin Securities, have confirmed to the public and regulatory authorities that their systems have been breached. Cybersecurity experts from the authorities are urgently assessing the extent of system damage, financial exposure, and the true scale of data leakage to prevent the spread of secondary financial risks.

Bithumb Discloses Details: Internal Mobile Office System Compromised

Among the attacked institutions, cryptocurrency exchange Bithumb was the first to disclose some details of the security incident to stabilize market sentiment. Bithumb's official statement indicated that the hacker intrusion did not directly control the core trading matching engine or the underlying hot and cold wallets that manage user funds, but rather its "internal mobile system used for employee office and communication." External attackers infiltrated this internal management channel through social engineering or vulnerabilities, resulting in the illegal theft of some internal sensitive and personal information. Although the platform claims that user assets remain safe, the breach of internal communication permissions still exposes the shortcomings of the exchange's internal network in terms of physical and logical isolation when facing advanced persistent threats (APT).

Security Challenges Without Borders in the Wave of Financial Digitalization

In light of the cybersecurity storm in Seoul at the end of October, this serial hacking incident reflects a dangerous trend: as traditional brokerages embrace digital assets (such as STO business) and cryptocurrency exchanges accelerate their formalization, both are facing common external threats to their underlying IT infrastructure and office systems. Hackers no longer distinguish between "classical finance" and "cryptocurrency finance," but view all nodes controlling large flows of capital as attack launchpads. For global trading platforms, strengthening internal zero-trust architecture and blocking vulnerabilities in employee communication terminals has become the last lifeline to safeguard the security of billions in assets.

Data Source: https://bbx.com/ Cryptocurrency Concept Stock Information Database, compiled based on yesterday's announcements from global listed companies and SEC/TSE disclosure documents.